o means the only motive which urged them to
such endeavours as theirs. To appreciate justly the intensity of their
anxiety for the conversion of the heathen, we must keep in our minds the
views then universally entertained of the merits and efficacy of mere
formal communion with the Church, and the fatal consequences of not being
within that communion.

EARLY ADVENTURERS.

This will go a long way towards explaining the wonderful inconsistency, as
it seems to us, of the most cruel and wicked men believing themselves to
be good Christians and eminent promoters of the faith, if only they
baptized, before they slew, their fellow-creatures. And the maintenance of
such church principles will altogether account for the strange oversights
which pure and high minds have made in the means of carrying out those
principles, fascinated as they were by the brilliancy and magnitude of the
main object they had in view.

But while piety, sometimes debased into religious fanaticism, had a large
part in these undertakings, doubtless the love of adventure and the
craving for novelty had their influence also. And what adventure it was!
New trees, new men, new animals, new stars; nothing bounded, nothing
trite, nothing which had the bloom taken off it by much previous
description! The early voyagers moreover, were like children coming out to
take their first gaze into the world, with ready credulity and unlimited
fancy, willing to believe in fairies and demons, Amazons and mystic
islands, "forms of a lower hemisphere," and fountains of perpetual youth.

MEDIAEVAL MAP OF THE WORLD; THE ROMAN DOMINION.

The known world, in the time of Prince Henry of Portugal (at whose
discoveries it will be convenient to take a preliminary glance), was a
very small one indeed. The first thing for us to do is to study our maps
and charts. Without frequent reference to these, a narrative like the
present forms in our mind only a mirage of names and dates and facts, is
wrongly apprehended even while we are regarding it, and soon vanishes
away. The map of the world being before us, let us reduce it to the
proportions it filled in Prince Henry's time; let us look at our infant
world. First take away those two continents, for so we may almost call
them, each much larger than a Europe, to the far west. Then cancel that
square massive looking piece to the extreme south-east; its days of penal
settlements and of golden fortunes are yet to come. Then turn t